nominal commander-in-chief managed to impose his will over the Bulgarian high command in favor of an attack of the Ottoman positions, despite the objections to a rashly organized attack raised by General Ivan Fichev and the raging cholera in the armies. The opinion of General Mihail Savov (the de facto commander-in-chief) who viewed an immediate attack as a tactical and strategic necessity also supported Ferdinand's opinion. Thus General Dimitriev, now in command of a sort of an army group that combined the Bulgarian First and Third armies, was tasked with the planning and execution of the attack on Chataldzha on 4 November and at least on paper could count on 175,000 men with 118,000 rifles against the Ottoman Army's 140,000 men and 103,000 rifles. In reality the available effectiveness on both sides was reduced by a raging cholera epidemic. General Dimitriev's recent experience however made him prone to underestimating the Ottoman Army and led him to commit only 14 regiments out of 38 in the attack; the rest he hoped to exploit after the Ottoman line was penetrated. This time however the Ottomans remained firm on almost all their positions and repelled all Bulgarian attack supported by their artillery which unlike the previous battles performed better than its Bulgarian counterpart. The result was a defeat and some 12,000 Bulgarian casualties, out of which some 8,451 were in the Third Army. The First and Third Bulgarian armies remained at the Chataldzha line until the end of the war and managed to repel several Ottoman attempted breakthroughs in 1913. Second Balkan War Almost immediately after the end of the First Balkan War, Bulgaria began to transfer its forces from Eastern Thrace to Macedonia in order to protect its threatened interests in the area. By the beginning of June, most of the Bulgarian Army was concentrated on the main theater of operations in Vardar and Aegean Macedonia, against the Serbian and Greek armies. The Bulgarian high command placed its First and Third armies along the old Serbian border. As this area was viewed as a secondary theater of operations, the strength of both armies was reduced significantly. The Third Army was now in fact one of the smallest field armies and had the following composition: Initially, the army had only one objective – to protect the capital Sofia. When the war began on 16 June, it and its neighboring 1st Army remained passive